Fence wars, driveway battles, hissy fits about overhanging trees and messy hedges… An astonishing 11million Brits have had a spat with neighbours over property boundaries, according to one survey, while another earlier this month said half of us had picked a fight with next door over blocked driveways, barking dogs and overgrown shrubs.
Personally, I think those figures are on the conservative side. I’ve run a garden and landscaping business across Devon for the last 30 years. And in that time, I’ve seen every kind of garden and boundary-related drama imaginable.
People think gardens are peaceful, relaxing places. In my experience, they bring out the worst in people: class anxieties, marital boredom, entitlement and petty power games.
Honestly, nothing surprises me anymore. Here’s some of the bad behaviour your gardener sees – and will judge you for – while he or she is getting stuck into your herbaceous borders.
Border disputes
Boundary issues are hardy perennials, and I’ve had to channel my inner United Nations peace negotiator to calm everyone down.
Yes, we’ve all read about the huge, not to mention costly, neighbour disputes that end up in court, but in my world it’s often the smaller, sneakier requests that reveal just how unhinged homeowners can become over a strip of land.
During one job, when I was working on a client’s fence, the woman next door came outside and asked if I could move it by ‘several inches’ so she would gain a bit more garden.
One woman next door came outside and asked the gardener if he could move the boundary by ‘several inches’ so she would gain a bit more garden
Totally amoral, not to mention illegal, but she was serious.
I had to point out that I obviously couldn’t just shift someone else’s boundary to give her extra space. When she tried to justify her request by explaining she wanted a bigger border to create a country cottage garden, saying she ‘needed’ room for plants that peaked in different seasons, I was so surprised I ended up explaining – at some length, for free – what she could do with the space she already had.
One businesswoman roped me into chopping down the overhang of her neighbour’s wisteria (that stuff, left untended, can become a complete nightmare). It was entangled around the fencing in front of her satellite dish. She assured me she had permission from her neighbour to give it a good hack.
Was she fibbing? The very stinky call I got from her neighbour when he returned from holiday told me all I needed to know. I immediately went to see the pair of them.
They could have given the War of the Roses a run for their money. Things only calmed down when the businesswoman finally agreed to pay for some new creepers.
If I’m working in a client’s garden while they are out at work, without fail, a head will appear over the fence or through the hedge from the neighbour’s side.
Usually they’ll want a bit of free advice – I discourage it because time is money – but sometimes they’ll want actual work – for free.
Can I ‘just trim back’ a bit of their side too? Look, the Pittosporum has gone right over – can’t I just come round and cut it back for them? If I want paying, then just add it to my client’s bill – it’s their plant, after all.
I usually laugh at those requests. But the other way round – when you’re cutting back a neighbour’s overgrown tree that’s become a nuisance in your client’s garden (following all the rules, of course) – all hell can break loose. I’ve seen perfectly civil neighbours turn sour over an out-of-control hedge.
Faced with red-faced neighbours threatening to call the council or even the police over a couple of overhanging branchlets, I say a silent prayer to Monty Don and put down the loppers. They can sort it out between themselves.
The garden bin bandits
There are those – from along the whole street, not just next door – who add their cuttings to my trailer or sneak their pruned branches into the skip. In front of one client and his neighbour, I unloaded several branches the neighbour had tossed into the back of my vehicle, light-heartedly saying: ‘I think these fell off your tree and into my trailer.’
I am more sympathetic when it comes to the dreaded Leylandii, however. Whenever I’m asked to plant Britain’s most controversial trees, I always try and talk clients out of it. I know why they want them – modern housing estates don’t offer much privacy – but these are eyesores.
Whenever I’m asked to plant Britain’s most controversial trees, I always try and talk clients out of it
Don’t get me wrong, I love trees. But what they are really planting is the beginning of a dispute with the neighbours, whose lovely sunny garden will very quickly become a gloomy, shaded one.
Unfortunately, the tragedy of Leylandii is that people leave them too long, then panic when they’ve reached street-light height. Unlike many hedges, you can’t simply take a chainsaw to them and expect a flush of growth.
One client who’d let more than 20 of them grow to 12 metres asked me to trim them back. I explained that if I did, they would either die off or, worse, topple over during a storm, due to their shallow roots.
And by the way, bamboo causes the same amount of grief. Its growth is relentless. If it’s in your garden, it will be in your neighbour’s garden shortly.
The front garden frontlines
Front gardens can be another surprising flashpoint.
For a while, there was a big craze for paving or tarmacking front gardens to create parking. On one job, I was doing exactly what my client had asked – removing gravel and replacing it with paving – when the neighbour came out and gave me a dressing down.
She was furious because she thought it would lower the value of her own house. It was ‘For Sale’ and apparently my appearance and the work in progress was knocking off thousands.
Exasperated, I explained I was not the homeowner – who was working overseas – and was simply carrying out the work I had been hired to do. Nonetheless she was utterly convinced I should delay the job and stop ruining her kerb appeal while she waited for a buyer. It was more entitled madness, of course. I carried on with the job.
The mad gardening fads
Some want everything white. Others want whatever they’ve just seen at Chelsea. One client would complain if I left so much as a single buttercup on their perfectly striped lawn. Honestly, you’d have thought I was mowing Centre Court at Wimbledon, not a 70ft back garden with a patio and hot tub in rural Devon.
And the impossible fashions too. If I had a pound for every time someone asked me to create an ‘exotic garden’, I would be a very rich man. Palm trees, olive trees, bougainvillea and all those other types of Mediterranean planting – people love the idea of it. And so do I. But importing Tuscany to Totnes is utter lunacy.
The problem is that, until very recently, much of the UK simply didn’t have the climate for that kind of garden. Clients would insist on planting things that were never going to thrive, then complain when they didn’t grow properly or died off.
They wanted north Devon to look like Nice, then blamed the gardener when the weather behaved like Britain. One client insisted I plant six olive trees in her south-facing garden. I really felt for those trees struggling through grey, rainy winters.
I needn’t have worried because she called me later, spitting feathers. She was horrified to return from holiday and discover they had all been stolen. Someone had liberated every single one of them by digging them up and carting them off. And, for the record, no, it wasn’t me.
One client would complain if the veteran gardener left so much as a single buttercup on their perfectly striped lawn
John the gardener in Desperate Housewives, played by Jesse Metcalfe in the hit TV series
The wildlife woes
Another client was in bits because foxes had moved into her garden. She’d spent a small fortune on her raised beds and the foxes were unfortunately using it as their personal toilet.
She didn’t want them killed, but she also didn’t want them setting up home and having their babies under the shed. I did what I could to make the garden more secure and less attractive as a denning spot all the while keeping it wildlife-friendly.
A week later, she rang me in a panic, asking if I had put poison down – almost accusing me. She’d found a poor dead fox in the veg patch. After asking on her neighbourhood WhatsApp group, she discovered what had happened. It turned out a neighbour further down the road had done the deed and poisoned them.
My client was devastated and, as far as I know, her garden is now a fox-friendly zone.
The dreaded plastic grass
This, as my granddaughter would say, gives me the ick. Yes, artificial grass is low maintenance for a homeowner and lucrative for me, but plastic turf is not the answer to creating a country garden. I haven’t installed many, but years after I’d laid one for a client, I bumped into the mum of two who had insisted on it for her postage-stamp-sized garden.
She laughed when she told me her son, aged five, was amazed by the ‘other kind of grass’ he encountered at school. Since discovering his green fingers, he had apparently tried to dig hers up at home looking for worms.
Be warned, though – artificial grass also irritates the neighbours, especially if you’ve got a cat that can’t do its business in your now plastic garden so hops over the fence to do it there.
And, yes, the roving eyes…
You’d be surprised how many women have propositioned me over the years. To be fair, in my younger days, I was less the Alan Titchmarsh figure I am today and more Lady Chatterley’s lover – gardeners often are.
With all that lugging sacks of earth and paving stones around, all that digging and tree-climbing, I had a pretty good six-pack and a fine set of biceps, too.
But I could also be precise and delicate with the secateurs and I knew the Latin names of all the shrubs in their raised beds. Lots of women find that very sexy too.
For the record, I am happily married and always keep – and kept – things professional.
But there are an awful lot of bored housewives who suddenly become very interested in having their gardens done once they realise a well-built man will be calling once a week.
The first time a female client brought me out a cold drink, I was a bit innocent. She then started bringing out moist flannels and towels too, so I could wash myself down before I left. I was grateful to not go home in a sweaty mess.But when she offered me the use of her downstairs shower, I should have seen the red flag. I didn’t and got the shock of my life when she opened the door and offered to join me. I know it sounds like a 1970s sitcom, but it’s true.
Since then, I’ve made it a rule never to accept drinks, towels or well-meaning compliments from female clients.
When my company was larger, I had a team of six guys and lost count of the number of them who did end up sleeping with one of the clients.
It’s not that I could technically stop them from doing it. They were grown men and grown women. But it certainly caused problems, especially when husbands started to suspect something was going on.
And, without wanting to sound sexist, women can be as as much a sex pest as the next man. One young lad asked to be taken off a job because the client kept trying to catch his eye from the window. I’ve discovered over the years that an awful lot of women enjoy sunbathing topless too.
After three decades working in other people’s gardens, I can honestly say that every homeowner, no matter how green-fingered they are, is searching for the same thing: a garden that’s more beautiful, less work and somehow bigger than the one they already have.
A garden might look like a bed of roses, gravel, decking and a neatly clipped hedge. But underneath it all there can be lust, resentment, jealousy, snobbery and full-blown neighbourhood warfare.
Ultimately, Britain’s gardens aren’t really about plants. They’re about people.
